5G Will Be the Fabric of Connectivity Around the World, Says Affirmed CEO

5G is really going to become the fabric of connectivity around the world, says Affirmed Networks CEO Hassan Ahmed. “The whole world is getting smarter,” he noted. “5G really brings blazingly fast internet access, new entertainment like virtual reality, and massive connectivity in cities to create smart cities. It brings everything from your home security system to the security of entire cities. This is what 5G is about.”

Hassan Ahmed, Chairman and CEO of Affirmed Networks, discusses the massive impact 5G is going to have and how Affirmed’s virtualization solutions dramatically impact enterprises in an interview on CNBC International:

5G Will Be the Fabric of Connectivity Around the World

5G is really going to become the fabric of connectivity around the world. The whole world is getting smarter. 5G really brings blazingly fast internet access, new entertainment like virtual reality, and massive connectivity in cities to create smart cities. It brings everything from your home security system to the security of entire cities. This is what 5G is about.

We pioneered this notion of creating these networks and software. That dramatically changes the economics and enables this to be rolled out on a grand scale. 5G is really a brand new capital cycle for the operators. The rollout of 5G is very different from 4G in the sense that this is very software driven. It’ll be running software in data centers. This makes it very very flexible for creating innovation and new services as we move forward.

Affirmed Changes How Networks Are Built

As we move to virtualization this is really a step change in how networks are built. If you think of the old way of building networks, they’re about buying these clunky boxes and scattering them around the countryside, which is very inflexible. What our technology enables you to do is to be very flexible and deploy this on a grand scale in data centers. Trust is a very important piece of the puzzle because the mobile core is where all of the service intelligence resides. It’s where you have to be secure and where you have to protect to avoid backdoors and things like that. Trust is a very key part of delivering these core networks.

The operators who are our clients and who build these networks have access to all the data that is flowing through the network. The way that data is used is really enabled by the core network. We see basically every piece of traffic that goes through the network. Many enterprises will enable end-to-end encryption so what goes through the network is already encrypted. Then what we do on top of that is we try to secure the network. We prevent intrusions and attacks and so forth on the network. We try to protect one mobile user from another. This is critical in isolating and delivering good security from that work.

5G Architecturally Will Be More Secure

At some level, everything is hackable because the more you secure things the more people come up with new ideas of how to hack. But 5G architecturally will be more secure. There are better and better security technologies that are being built into the capabilities of the network. Slicing is also a very interesting capability and we actually do it today in 4G. We’re one of the only companies I think that enables that in 4G.

With 5G slicing is native. The idea is that even if I discover that there’s a rogue user on the network I can create an isolated slice of the network and just quarantine them on that. We can create isolated slices for individual enterprises and that’s part of what provides more trust and more security.